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Last week, Chelsea Manning announced that she would fight a subpoena to appear before a Grand Jury and testify about her whistleblowing activities, citing her concern that "testimony before grand juries is secret, grand juries can create fear by suggesting that some members of a political community may be secretly cooperating with the government. In this way, grand juries can seed suspicion and fear in activist communities."
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They say Ms Haspel was allowed to listen to the audio during a visit to Turkey earlier this week....Soon after the murder on 2 October, Turkish media quoted officials as saying they had audio recordings of Khashoggi's interrogation and death, but gave no details about the contents or how the audio had been obtained

Gina Haspel somehow getting to listen in on Khashoggi being tortured is like when the editor of a travel magazine somehow gets to spend a month in Bali. Read the rest

During the Cultural Revolution, millions of dissidents (and those suspected of dissidence) were sent to "re-education camps" where torture and slave labor were augmented by marathon "self-criticism" sessions where prisoners would have to engage in prolonged recitations and disavowals of their heresies.
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When Yeonmi Park was just 13 years old, after suffering inhumanely under the North Korean regime, she and her family escaped to China (and eventually to South Korea).

She is now 24 years old and has become a vocal advocate for human rights in the country she once fled from. In this New York Times video, this brave young defector describes the terrible conditions for people in her home country and asks Trump to hold its dictator Kim Jong-un accountable for these human rights violations.

You may remember Park from a few years ago when she told her story at the One Young World Summit 2014 in Dublin, Ireland:

Park’s family was loving and close-knit, but life in North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the country’s dictator, could read her mind. After her father was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market, a risk he took in order to provide for his wife and two young daughters, Yeonmi and her family were branded as criminals and forced to the cruel margins of North Korean society. With thirteen-year-old Park suffering from a botched appendectomy and weighing a mere sixty pounds, she and her mother were smuggled across the border into China.

Gina Haspel now appears to have secured enough votes to be confirmed as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, after two additional Senate Democrats today announced they will vote for her. Read the rest

For more than a century, the Canadian government pursued a policy of forcibly removing First Nations people from their homes and imprisoning them in largely church-run "residential schools" where violence, rape and other forms of abuse were rampant. The last residential school closed in 1986.
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Gina Haspel is a 33-year veteran of the CIA, notorious for overseeing a torture camp in Thailand where rendered suspects were subjected to simulated executions; Haspel is also notorious for participating in a mass coverup of CIA torture, helping to destroy over 100 videotapes of abuses that took place under her direction.
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Lauri Love is a British man on the autism spectrum who also has depression and severe eczema, who was facing extradition to America on charges of hacking US military and private agencies.
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When Rep Tim Murphy resigned in shame after he was outed for pressuring his mistress to get an abortion while serving on the "House Pro-Life Caucus," it triggered a special election in Pennsylvania's 18th, a rustbelt district in the southwest corner of the state, where a strong Democrat candidate named Conor Lamb is polling high against his Republican opponent, torture advocate Rick Saccone, who served as an Army intelligence support consultant at Abu Ghraib prison after its torture scandal.
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Psychologist James Mitchell is the self-described "architect" of the CIA's torture program (a consulting gig that netted him a cool $80m at taxpayer expense), along with his partner John "Bruce" Jessen -- they're the pair who oversaw black-site torture programs that killed and maimed people who'd been convicted of no crime by any court, anywhere in the world. Read the rest

The administration of President Donald Trump has started to return to Congress copies of an extensive 2014 report on the the CIA's interrogation and detention practices, U.S. officials revealed on Friday. Read the rest